Off On A Wild Goose Chase

help arrives, but it´s uncoordinated

We have heard rumours over the last few days of two possible loads destined for us here in the orphanage, and this morning we are told to locate one of these at the airport, a place that does not hold the best of memories for me having been deserted by HODR and where i personally suffered a vicious verbal assault.

Nonetheless, we have an address on Avenue Haille Saillaise and Jean – Luc, Wilkens and i set off around 8am this morning with high hopes as food supplies are reaching dangerously low levels for us.

Unusually it is already really hot, something that is usually not felt till after 9.30 so we know we are in for a hot one. We drop Wilkens off in the city centre to complete some paperwork, whilst J-L and myself head out towards the airport. We have strict instructions to head to the major roundabout to locate the depot and to make sure there are photographs of the transaction; all sounds pretty straightforward.

However, this is Port au Prince, and nothing is straightforward.

Locals by the airport insist we need the roundabout on the other side of the airport, so we walk up the 2kms or so in the searing heat, checking with locals as we go, who continue to point further up the road. The further we travel, the more sceptical we become.

Eventually arriving at the second roundabout we ask a police officer for the umpteenth time for Avenue Haille Saillaise, who tells us, yes he knows it, and it is down by the airport. We grudgingly turn back from whence we came. We have no extra money in our pockets and we are slowly but surely wilting with dehydration with not even enough money for a 25 cent packet of water.

Back at the first roundabout and we are saved by a Federal Republic of Germany water pump and we gulp greedily. I have never been so grateful to the Germans as now.

We do finally locate Avenue Haille Saillaise and it is filled with hundreds of containers with hordes of people walking around lost. There is no officials to ask and we meander with the other lost souls in the vague hope we will bump into the one destined for us, but we don´t.

There is aid arriving in all the time. Look around any of the hundreds of squatter camps and you can see evidence of Save the Children, Concern, Red Cross, Medicine sans Frontier, US Aid and the United Nations, but there seems to be absolutely no co-ordination between these different groups, with no-one taking charge. No-one knows the complete picture, and what is needed where and when.

We pick up Wilkens in town and head back up to the orphanage despondently and empty-handed.

This hellish ordeal has taken some five hours and we have nothing to show for our exploits today. Tomorrow we have to head to the wharf for another possible shipment for us. I´m fearing the worst.